


put a blue ribbon on my brain

by iskra (kiira)



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, abuse cw, suicide cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-26
Updated: 2014-12-26
Packaged: 2018-03-03 17:01:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2858270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiira/pseuds/iskra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>even then, you knew that your love would leave you gasping<br/>[carmilla from 1693 until now, snippets of hundreds of years]</p>
            </blockquote>





	put a blue ribbon on my brain

_i dream all year, but they’re not the sweet kinds_  
_and the shivers move down my shoulder blades in double time_  
_and now people talk to me, i’m slipping out of reach now_  
_people talk to me, and all their faces blur_  
_-yellow flicker beat, lorde_

/

You are thirteen and your brother dares you to swim across the river (once you were thirteen, once you had a brother).

Your skirts are heavy, heavy, heavy and they drag you down as ice fills your child’s lungs (your gasped for air; death snuck in), drowning is something like desperation, something like forgetting everything but pinpricks.

A farmer hears your brother’s screaming and pulls you out, carries you in his arms back to your house, you fill with air as the sky dances overhead, _this_ you think, _this is hope_.

//

She comes the summer after you turn fifteen, the younger sister of a scorned English nobleman allied with your father; (you pester your older brother until he tells you the whole story; no one thought to tell you anything of politics or thinking, nothing to worry your pretty head).

Her name is Margaret and her German is clumsy (your English is clumsier, but you’re quick)(if you had been a boy, you would have been called intelligent) and in a month you’re chattering away in a messy mixture of French and English and you fall in love with her quite easily one afternoon

(Love was something you gave out easily then; you loved the world and you thought it loved you back.)

You’re sitting in your room, sewing long abandoned (“Mircalla!” Your mother will say, “I pity the man who must marry you and your excuse for needlework,” and you will laugh because you are fifteen and everything seems so much grander than the inevitability of growing up).

You lean over, and Margaret's curling black hair brushes your cheek.

“I’m going back to England soon,” she whispers, breath touching your lungs, “My mother does not think that Austria is ‘beneficial to my marriage prospects.’”

You scrunch up your nose and she giggles, (you are close to her, much closer than you’ve been to anyone).

“You could marry one of my brothers,” you suggest, “and then we could be sisters.”

(You do not want to be Margaret’s sister.)

She looks at you and your breath catches in your throat because (her eyes are dark and she does not want to be your sister either.)

Slowly (slowly, slowly, slowly) you turn your head so her breath brushes against your lips (she smiles and moves the breath of an inch, she smiles and kisses you).

Margaret is sweet, she is smiling, you are smiling (your nose knocks against hers and you’re giggling, her lips are soft and wonderful.)

A door somewhere slams shut and you pull away from her, breath left in her mouth (even then, you knew that your love would leave you gasping.)

//

Your older brother leaves for school in Graz, and he comes back brimming with astronomy and math, philosophy and Greek and a thousand things you could only dream of.

He acts older than his nineteen years, having lofty debates with himself and smirking at your painstakingly translated Latin, and in your jealously, you act younger than your seventeen, sulking in the servants quarters with Leni, one of your family’s maids, and her seemingly endless supply of brandy.

“Leni,” you slur, her head in your lap, “what’s going to happen to us?”

She buries her face in your thigh and makes a tiny whimpering noise, before sitting up and taking another long drink out of the bottle that was clutched tight in your hand.

“You’re gonna marry a count, and have his children and live happily ever after,” and she shoves the bottle back at you so hard that the brandy spills all over your dress, “and I’m gonna work for you for the rest of my life.”

You take your drink.

“’m sorry,” you whisper, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—I –”

She shrugs, light again. “It’s the way of the world,” and sits clumsily on your lap, tugging your hair out of the remnants of its elaborate curls, “It’s not your fault.”

(There’s some small revenge against the world in kissing Leni, in letting her push you back against the wall and take and take and take)

(You are just two girls; you have learned that the world does not always love you back).

//

The world, quite simply, does not love you back.

You are sliced open; you are eighteen and watch as your blood spills onto the floor (there was nothing inevitable about your growing old).

//

You hurt.

You _hurt_ and god, death is stolen through your fingers. She calls herself Mother, Maman and she hold your head as you gulp down blood and (she forces a trembling back into your fingers, a life between your bones and a terror into your cold dead heart).

//

Slowly you forget the details of the girl you once were (how she walked, the way her laugh sounded, did she smile the way you do?) and you fill up pages of journals in 1709 because you are still young enough that you remember how your brother’s hands moved as he talked (and you are terrified that you will forget).

Maman finds them and she burns them, stroking your hair as she whispers sweetly to you, “You are more that she will ever be, my sweet,” and you watch your family burn.

//

(You turn eighteen for the thirteenth time; you have perfected the art of smiling at girls with pretty, pearl teeth and bringing them to Maman to gorge yourself on their sweet, sweet flesh.)

When one of the girls licks her way into your mouth, Maman laughs delightedly at you and pets your cheek, her fingers still wet with the blood of your lover.

“What a wicked thing you are, my darling,” and you wonder quietly, quickly if this was always part of you.

Maman twirls away in a glimmer of jewels and you banish the thought; this adds more (you can lure girls in with the promise of flesh, of lust, of fingers and mouths and heat).

//

(1793: you dance in the bloodbath that is France; you sleep with a different girl every night and kill on a whim, the never-ending smell of death in the air is _intoxicating_.)

Maman takes you to the guillotine and these humans are not so different from you: they crave blood, blood, blood (“So wasteful,” Maman clucks her tongue at you, “So much rich blood,”) and you watch as grandmothers scream with rage.

La Terreur slowly begins to trickle to an end and you grow bored again (you learn, with a kind of bored fascination, that the guillotine will not cut through your neck; you kill the executioner who stares at you in awe when you stand up, not sure if you are something damned or something holy).

When she finds out about your experiment, Maman is furious (she locks you in the back room of your apartment for a week and six days; she does not feed you).

You learn for the first time of the fits that seize your body when you do not feed; you beg her for a drop of blood, human, animal, _anything_ , but there is nothing but silence.

(You curl in on yourself and wait and wait and wait for it to end).

She comes in on the fourteenth day with a girl and she helps you choke down mouthful after mouthful after mouthful, a hand on the back of your neck.

“I would never let my dear girl starve,” she murmurs once you are gasping and blood is staining your chin, “you just needed to learn a lesson.”

And you bow your head and nod.

//

She drowns you under the earth and you do not have words, language, anything to speak of this horror. It is beyond the curve of sounds in your mouth,

(You are sitting tied to a chair in your dorm room, and “you can’t tell it like that!” She is soft and beautiful, but Laura darling, you have no other _way_.)

//

Three days after Maman finds you in Paris, you jump ( _a stake_ , your trembling heart sings _, a stake,_ ) but you want the crunch of your bones snapping as they hit the pavement (you wake up screaming every night and you are numb, you are numb, you are numb).

The leap does not kill you (you are already dead).

You lie, crumpled in the back alley somewhere in Paris for hours and you think, _She will never take me again_.

//

Laura is warm when she curls up next to you, her hair tickling your chest, and LaFontaine is shooting you inappropriate hand gestures from across the diner.

You flip them off and press a kiss to Laura’s head (you will not kiss her again with so many watching; it feels like a spectacle, like your Mother’s lures and Laura is warm and lovely and something blossoming.) (she is something maybe yours).

She makes a sleepy noise and curls tighter into your side (she is somehow holding your hand; she is truly incredible.)

You remember the swirling Austrian sky and a gasp of air after drowning; you thread Laura’s hair between your fingers and _this_ , you think, _this is hope._

**Author's Note:**

> evidently winter break means staying up much too late and writing carmilla fic


End file.
